A monster black hole was found by Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, reported NASA. What's even more confounding is that this black hole so enormous is located inside a very small galaxy.
Its home galaxy M60-UCD1 dwarf is so dense it crams 140 million stars within a diameter of 300 light-years, which is only 1/500th of our galaxy's diameter. In this galaxy you can actually view 1 million stars with your naked eye as compared to our planet in which you can view 4000 stars in a nighttime sky, CNET reported from an information from NASA.
This discovery led to a theory that there are other compact galaxies with gargantuan black holes. This also suggests that these smaller ones are vestiges of larger galaxies that came into collision leaving remnants behind, reported BoingBoing.
University of Utah astronomer Anil Seth-lead author of an international study of the dwarf galaxy published in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature-believed that this collision is the most probable cause of the birth of these dwarf galaxies. "We don't know of any other way you could make a black hole so big in an object this small."
Black holes have gravitational pull so strong that even light cannot escape from it. They form from gravitationally collapsed and very compact objects. Supermassive black holes -- those with the mass of at least one million stars like our sun -- are thought to be at the centers of many galaxies.
The supermassive black hole found at the center of M60-UCD1 has a mass of 21 million suns, which makes up a staggering 15 percent of the galaxy's total mass. On the other hand, the black hole inside the Milky Way galaxy has the mass of 4 million suns and that is only 0.01 percent of the Milky in reference to its total mass.
"That is pretty amazing, given that the Milky Way is 500 times larger and more than 1,000 times heavier than the dwarf galaxy M60-UCD1," Seth said.
The Hubble Space Telescope, which is used to survey and study the universe, is an international project of NASA and European Space Agency. NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the telescope. The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore conducts Hubble science operations, wrote NASA.
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